meme: an idea, behavior, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture agora: a gathering place

Welcome to Neal's gathering place for ideas.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Instant Wiki

One of the best collaborative tools I've found in a long time for development projects is a Wiki because it is lightweight and free-form enough that everyone will use it. We've had one for a while at DSW and I'm stunned at how useful it is. There are lots of overblown document sharing systems out in the world (recently, I had the displeasure of using Microsoft's SharePoint -- ugh!), but the simple Wikis Just Work.

The one we've used for a while at DSW is Very Quick Wiki from SourceForge, a quick, simple, J2EE based Wiki. It took all of 15 minutes to setup and has run flawlessly for months.

I recently discovered an even easier one to set up -- Instiki. The instructions are so complex I'm going to reproduce them here:

OK, it's slightly more complex (you have to have Ruby installed), but not much. It stores everything in the filesystem (in a single portable directory if you have to move it, back it up, etc.), includes its own web server, and it Just Works. It is now officially my new favorite ultra-lightweight Wiki. And, it's Ruby based, which makes it even dearer to my heart!